David Ortiz: Bad apples must go

Bobby Valentine walked into rotten situation

Credit: AP

As the slugging DH looks back at the 2012 season, he wonders if the Red Sox were doomed from the start, so broken and dysfunctional were they after the debacle in 2011.

And as many of us point the finger at fired manager Bobby Valentine for the travails of this season, Ortiz isn’t willing to go there.

He recently said he believes the problems run much, much deeper.

“I don’t feel like blaming Bobby for how things went down,” said Ortiz, who consistently avoided the managerial politics that engulfed many of his teammates. “He walked into a situation that it wasn’t like we were in the best situation. We weren’t in the best shape ever. He walked in trying to fix things up, and things didn’t get better, but it was like that already.

“So me, personally, I think if you’re going to get a bag of apples, you can’t just get one bad one out. Some of them that were infected by the one bad one, you can’t just leave them right there. Because they’re going to continue being the same. They’re going to continue being the same bad things with the rest of them that are still good.

“If you want to make the whole bag better, you’ve got to take all those apples out and make sure no one in there is infected and then you can do things. I’m not saying there are any bad apples here, but we work as a group and Bobby as our manager, he made a decision, but it’s not only about him making the decision. As a player, you’ve got to execute, too, and we didn’t do that.”

Ortiz insisted he wasn’t singling any out any particular “bad apples,” and that to focus on one name or another missed the bigger point: the Red Sox of the past year have been broken from top to bottom.

“This is the way I see it,” Ortiz said. “Everybody has to take some of the blame with how everything went down, without pointing fingers. Do we have to get better next year? Yeah, all the way around. Everybody needs to come ready next year, whoever is here, ready to perform at the highest level and forget about the (expletive).”

Ortiz believes he’ll be one of those players returning, though he’s technically a free agent. He also trusts that with the benefit of an outside perspective, the front office will do what needs to be done to change the culture of the team.

“I think there’s a good chance of us coming back next year strong,” he said. “Me as a player, I’ve learned so many things that can go wrong with a ballclub. And I’m in it. I’m pretty sure whoever is watching from the outside (in the front office) should have a better knowledge of fixing things that went wrong this year.

“It’s like when we’re hitting. The reason you have a hitting coach is four eyes can see more than two. He can see from the outside what you’re doing wrong, things that you can’t see because you’re in it. It’s the same thing with an organization. You’ve got people making decisions with that (perspective). If things didn’t work out this year, whatever decisions you made, you’ve got to think about it before you make the same mistake the following year.”

Ortiz spoke without rancor or accusation. He was simply speaking what he believed to be the truth. And he’s not excepting himself from blame. He just wants the Red Sox to regain their former lofty perch.

“I’m the kind of person, I come here to do my job,” he said. “I don’t know if that is part of what I am, or what I do, but I don’t feel like blaming any one person for things that we failed at as a group.”